SAMHSA Harms Mentally Ill and Should Be Fixed (PDF)

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Agency (SAMHSA) no longer focuses on serious mental illness. Mission creep has made the agency, at best, irrelevant to helping people with serious mental illness, and often politically correct to the point of being harmful. Its main focus has become making people happier, under the guise of “improving mental health”. The serously ill are left to fend for themselves.

  • * Encourages states to use Recovery Models that don’t help seriously mentally illl vs. medical models that do.
    • Recovery Model gives skills acquisition for high functioning.
    • SMI need medical treatment amelioration first.
  • Provides funding and support to groups that work to prohibit individuals with serious mental illness from being treated until after they become ‘danger to self or others’ like
    • Jared Loughner
    • Russell Weston Jr
    • James Holmes
    • John Hinckley
    • Unabomber, etc.
  • Allowed Protection and Advocacy for Mentally Ill Individuals (PAMII) program spiral out of control. SAMHSA funded lawyers are suing states for providing treatment.
    • (Ex. Disability Rights California is threatening to sue counties that implement Laura’s Law, Fake AOT report in NY)
  • Created regulations that ensure block grants to states help the highest functioning, rather than most seriously ill
  • Wastes money

SAMHSA Fact Check

Three of four foundations SAMHSA uses to distribute funds are false

SAMHSA … devotes its programs, policies, … contracts and grants toward helping the Nation act on the knowledge that:

  • Prevention works; (Fact Check: False. We do not know how to prevent mental illness)
  • People recover from mental and substance use disorders (Fact Check: False. Serious Mental Illness is often chronic)
  • Behavioral Health is essential for health; (Fact Check: True)
  • Treatment is effective; (Fact Check: Yes)

SAMHSA is wrong about Resliency, Empowerment, Stigma, Suicide, Outreach, Early Intervention, Prevention, Consensus, employment and more.

Some Ways to Fix SAMHSA:

  • *Eliminate SAMHSA and transfer worthy programs to NIMH and other agencies
  • Fire Pamela Hyde
    • Replace with an administrator who is passionate about helping the most seriously mentally ill.
    • Like SAMHSA, NIMH had also engaged in serious mission creep. Once Thomas Insel was appointed, he turned around the agency so that most of the efforts now focus on the most seriously mentally ill.
  • * Create federal definition of Serious Mental Illness and require SAMHSA (and all mental health agencies to spend X% of their funds on it
  • Pass Legislation narrowing requiring SAMHSA to focus on serious mental illness
  • Change Name of Agency to Substance Abuse and Mental Illness Agency (SAMIA) to attempt changing focus.
  • End the PAIMII program or place limits on what it does
  • Prohibit SAMHSA from distributing grants to
    • Any organization that does not believe mental illness exists
    • Any organization that claims to “prevent” mental illness
    • Specific Organzations engaged in anti-treatment efforts like:
      • Statewide Consumer Networks (Eleven Grants of $70K each, used to oppose AOT and use of medical model for mental illness.
      • National Technical Assistance Centers (Five $300K grants used to oppose AOT, oppose medical model, and teach mentally ill how to go off meds
      • National Empowerment Center
      • Bazelon, National Coalition of Mental Health Consumer/Survivor Organizations
      • National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery
      • California Network for Mental Health Clients
      • Pennsylvania Mental Health Consumers Assn
      • Consumers Self Help Center
      • Vermont Psychiatric Survivors